September 12th: a Toy World – The First Newsgame

In 2003, Gonzalo Frasca created ‘September 12th: A Toy World’, the first Serious Game to be considered a Newsgame, this means a game with journalistic purposes. This polemical Serious Game aims to create debate around the war against terrorism. However, the game alerts: ‘This is not a game. You can’t win and you can’t lose’. Absolutely true.

Since its release, ‘September 12th’ has been used as an example of Newsgame and Serious Game in every academic research on the topic. The reason is that this is the perfect match between telling something important to people and creating constructive debate using game’s mechanics.

In this Serious Game you need to kill terrorists shooting missiles. The action uses first person perspective in order to enhance immersion. The problem is that terrorists are surrounded by civilians and it is almost impossible to attack terrorists without killing civilians too. The dead are mourned and the rage of the survivors turns them into terrorists. You just have to play for a couple of minutes to realize that the only way to avoid ‘collateral damage’ is not to play.

‘September 12th’ is a great example of how Serious Games make people think and debate. The player focuses in playability but ends up understanding the cruel truth: you cannot win, you cannot kill only terrorists dropping bombs, violence will only cause more violence, suffering and death.

You can play September 12th for free at Newgaming.com or take a look to its gameplay watching the following video

About Florencia Espel

Graduate in Journalism by Santiago de Compostela University and specialized in journalism and new technologies, she is working on her thesis about “News Games as a Journalistic Genre”.
Always focused in bringing the best quality to video games news and completely fascinated by indie games, at On Serious Games she is in charge of the Game Analysis Section.